In last year’s “State of the World” column, I made the argument that the Netherlands was the globe’s most significant country in 2023. Mounting anger over inflation, tensions around immigration and a disconnect between urban elites and rural communities contributed to a surprising election result that saw the nationalist and isolationist party emerge victorious.
I speculated at the time that the Dutch elections of 2023 could be a harbinger of things to come in 2024. They were. With more than 60 elections worldwide and billions of people eligible to vote, nationalist and conservative candidates won in the United States, European Union, Africa, Asia and Latin America. The issues that animated voters in the Netherlands animated electoral politics around the world: inflation, immigration, identity politics and a lack of faith in 20th century institutions. So, was the Netherlands again the most consequential nation in 2024? It was not, in my humble opinion. This year, that distinction belonged to Argentina.
The issues at stake in Argentina encapsulated the principal existential question of 2024 namely, What should be the role of government?
Should government be large, replete with a variety of agencies with sizable budgets that serve a wide range of people’s needs?
Or should government be small, concerned solely with matters of economics and national defense with strict limits on all other spending?
How should governments balance care for citizens today versus the need to ensure solvency in the future?
How much responsibility do governments have for protecting independent journalism—and what are the consequences when they do not?
How much responsibility do governments have for supporting science, the humanities, research and the arts—and what are the consequences when they do not?
Is it the role of government to dictate the cultural and ethnic makeup of a nation? What lengths are justified to do so, and which policies are repressive, immoral and unethical?
Most fundamentally, will democratic governments that represent the will of the people be able to survive the 21st century?
All of these questions have been debated in Argentina in 2024 under President Javier Milei. Trained as an economist, and achieving fame via television debates and viral Internet memes, Milei assumed office promising to radically reduce the size of government, cut spending, and impose austerity measures that he argued would hurt citizens in the short-term but put the country on sounder footing over the long-term.
During his first year, Milei’s administration laid off tens-of-thousands of government workers, froze wages and pensions, cut universities, closed the national theater institute, shuttered a state-funded news agency and defunded scientific research. The short-term effects have been increased poverty and unemployment. But sky-high inflation, which has plagued Argentina for two decades, reached its lowest level in years, decreasing from a monthly rate of 25.5% in December 2023 to 2.7% in October 2024. Prices have come down, and Milei’s approval rating has hovered near 50%.
Milei’s influence extends beyond Latin America. He has gained celebrity status among like-minded politicians, pundits and businessmen in the United States and Europe, culminating in a relationship with President Trump and Elon Musk. Milei’s “chainsaw approach” to slashing the size and scope of government has, reportedly, inspired the Trump-established and Musk-Ramaswamy-led “Department of Government Efficiency,” (DOGE) which aims to eliminate entire U.S. government agencies such as the Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as eliminate funding for PBS television and National Public Radio (NPR). DOGE embodies a long-held belief by Conservatives in limited government, and with their win in November’s elections they have promised to take aim at a U.S. federal deficit that is nearly $2 trillion, a federal debt that is nearly $34 trillion, and a federal budget that is more than $6 trillion. Nearly half of those expenditures are for medical costs (Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) and social security benefits, meaning lawmakers will be forced to make difficult decisions on cutting programs now in order to ensure their solvency later.
The electoral successes of Conservatives have enjoined a wave of spending cuts worldwide. In New Zealand, government jobs and spending are being cut across the Department of Education, Ministry of Housing, Department of Conservation, Ministry for Culture and the agency supporting vulnerable children, just to name a few. Humanities and social sciences research is also being slashed by the ruling coalition that includes the “New Zealand First” party. In the Netherlands, the Conservative government will cut €1.2 billion from education over the next four years, essentially eliminating humanities departments at Dutch universities as stand-alone programs, in addition to eliminating African Studies, Latin American Studies, German, French and Italian. The Dutch government has also revealed plans to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid and humanitarian assistance, as has the government of Sweden. Declining government funding for universities in Canada, coupled with a new measure restricting international students who pay full tuition, has put several Canadian universities at existential risk of failure.
This approach to government has not solely been an economic program. As articulated by Milei in numerous interviews, he also positions himself as shaping the cultural and ideological make-up of the nation-state. Milei has openly railed against what he calls the “woke mind virus,” a short-hand for a strand of Progressive politics that he argues is infecting civilization. Ideologues worldwide have set out to use government as a blunt instrument in the culture wars, upholding an Anti-Homosexuality Act in Uganda, barring healthcare access for transgender youth in the United Kingdom, and restricting immigration and asylum in Sweden in order to protect the racial and ethnic make-up of the state.
These tensions around the ethnic and racial composition of the nation-state have intensified as the numbers of international migrants continue to increase. The United Nations 2024 World Migration Report estimates that some 280 million people globally are now international migrants, comprising 3.6% of the world population. The most active corridor remains that of Mexico to the United States, largely due to the upheavals in Latin America and the Caribbean. In Ecuador, the government has declared a war on international gangs who are ruthlessly executing a massive and lucrative cocaine trade that has turned the country into a living hell for citizens. (The Ecuadorian city of Durán has been ranked the most violent city in the world, with a homicide rate of 145 per 100,000 inhabitants). In Mexico, a country ravaged by drug and gang violence for years, it is estimated that more than 100,000 people remain missing. In Haiti, armed gangs attacked police stations, prisons and other institutions in 2024, paralyzing the capital and forcing the resignation of acting prime minister Ariel Henry, who himself assumed power after the assassination of Jovenel Moïse.
Haitians, Mexicans and Ecuadoreans were among the millions of individuals attempting to flee gang violence, crime and desperate economic circumstances for a chance at a better life in the United States. The result has been millions of encounters at the southwestern border of the U.S. between migrants and Customs and Border Control officials that became the major theme of President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign. Trump interposed the issue of the border and migration into both his economic and cultural messaging: migrants entering the U.S. illegally steal jobs and resources from law-abiding Americans, he argued, and bring with them violence, disease and indignity that will lead to civilizational and governmental collapse.
Governmental collapse, itself, was a feature of 2024: in France, President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the country’s parliament in June after a poor showing in the European Parliament elections, only to have the government collapse six months later when Prime Minister Michel Barnier was ousted in a no-confidence vote. In Germany, chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote in Parliament, triggering a snap election seven months ahead of schedule. In South Korea, the Conservative president Yoon Suk Yeol attempted to declare martial law and use military personnel to block access to parliament, only to have parliament override his decree and throw the country into political chaos. Recently, the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad collapsed swiftly and stunningly as rebels swept across the country, deposing the dictator and exposing his egregious human rights violations.
It remains to be seen whether the revolution in Syria proves to be a victory for democracy or an exchange of one form of autocracy for another. In other contexts, it is clear that democratic governance has been undermined or, in some cases, overturned. In Rwanda, President Kagame won reelection with 99% of the vote in part because eight other candidates were barred from running. In Venezuela, authorities declared President Nicolás Maduro the winner of a presidential election widely considered to be tainted and disputed, with international observers arguing that his challenger, Edmundo González Urrutia, actually won. And in Georgia, the Georgian Dream party has disregarded the will of the people to join the European Union by making a decided turn towards Moscow. Georgian citizens have responded with massive street protests that have been met with brutality and violence by police.
Violence was another constant throughout 2024, most notably the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Estimates are that the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine has caused one million casualties to-date, while the war between the Israeli Defense Forces and the Iranian government’s proxies of Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis have killed an estimated 45,000 individuals. In Africa, the ongoing Sudanese civil war has killed almost 15,000 people, displaced 8 million others, and has included numerous mass atrocities and war crimes, including sexual violence against women and girls.
Finally, compounding all of this has been climate change. The year 2024 was Earth’s hottest year on record, as heat waves across every continent killed scores of people, fueled devastating hurricanes and cyclones, overwhelmed power grids, and exacerbated pollution and drought. In a fitting and symbolic display of government paralysis, global governments met for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan, only to leave without delivering any new commitments to cut greenhouse gases and with only modest climate finance goals. As summarized by experts at the Council on Foreign Relations, the summit “raised doubts about the ability of the COP process to halt alarming global warming trends.”
Which brings us back to Argentina. Argentina withdrew its delegation from the COP29 climate talks, and is considering withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords. President Milei is on the record as describing climate change and efforts to combat it as a “socialist lie,” interweaving the climate issue into both economic and cultural debates. The Argentinian government may view extraction of its non-climate-friendly natural resources—mining, natural gas, and petroleum—as a way to mitigate its short-term economic problems. But the country is also facing historic flooding and drought exacerbated each year by the climate crisis, causing societal instability and billions of dollars in damage that threaten Argentinian society over the long-term.
It is for these reasons that when I look across the world at the end of 2024, I see a widespread crisis of government, as well as a crisis of democracy. Billions of individuals in China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Angola, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Brunei, Myanmar and other countries currently live under the grip of governments where individual freedoms are severely curtailed by an individual or party wielding unchecked control over state apparatuses, and in which independent journalism, scholarship and activism are severely threatened by intimidation, harassment and violence. Billions more people are living in countries experiencing government upheaval or democratic backsliding, from Europe and Africa to Latin America and the Caribbean, including attacks on journalists, scholars, and civil servants; discrimination against marginalized groups; widespread corruption; and unfair elections. On every continent, governments are collapsing, leaning into nationalist and protectionist sentiments, and favoring short-term political expediency over the long-term protection of our planetary ecosystem and our individual liberties.
The perils of this global reality become even starker when the speed and proliferation of technology-enhanced surveillance, repression and weaponry are factored in. In China, children are monitored by the government from the time they are in kindergarten, with enormous volumes of data collected on individuals from a young age in order to promote regime-compliant behavior. In Serbia, authorities have deployed surveillance technology to repress journalists and activists, using spyware and mobile phone extraction to download contacts and personal data from individuals without their knowledge and using it to stifle dissent or squash protests. In Venezuela, the “Homeland System” integrates a person’s national ID number with their car registration, voter rolls, and social media handles for the purpose of social control. As these technologies become even more sophisticated via artificial intelligence, their potential to be used by governments against their own citizens raises the prospects of digital repression the likes of which we have never seen.
In short, our world currently faces many challenges. To solve these challenges will require stable, functioning and competent governments that can work among themselves and with others within international frameworks to agree on solutions and follow through on their commitments. These governments should be democracies that work for the people, in responsiveness to, and in the best interest of, their citizens. Most crucially, all individuals should be able to think, move, speak, love, worship and live freely, while voting in free and fair elections that hold government leaders accountable. This year has seen a rise of the opposite: movements antipathetic towards democracy and international structures; a further splintering of international collaborations, norms and frameworks; an increasingly inward-facing and ideologically-driven conception of the nation-state; and an inability of government leaders to work together within their own countries or on the global stage.
Such approaches might secure short-term political power for particular individuals or parties, but they are not solutions for guaranteeing the long-term future of the planet and the rights of all species who live on it. To realize that future will require democracy, tolerance, human rights, pluralism, equality, global cooperation, independent journalism and serious historical and scientific research that is adequately funded—ideals of the 20th century that now feel endangered in the 21st century. Our task in 2025 and beyond is to program those values into our new operating systems, and remind our fellow citizens why they are important and worth fighting for.
We have a lot of work to do.
Best wishes for the New Year,
-JS
Broad-ranging and visionary. Terrific, and disturbing. Thanks, Jason.
Agreed wholeheartedly, thank you.